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“The Birth of a New Hero” (2008), 35 x 30 x 45 cm by Tung Ming-Chin

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David Inshaw, 1972-3

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Noah Kalina’s photos of the Callicoon Theater in Sullivan county, NY.

https://mailchi.mp/noahkalina/newsletter122

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David Lynch, Interior Designer of Dreams 

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Stair to Nowhere, Hotel Fontainebleau Miami - Morris Lapidus.  This stair leads to...a coat closet...so that people can deposit their coats and then descend in their elegant glory for all to admire.

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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/review-vanishing-stepwells-india-180962637/

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Hadid’s radical stance as a practitioner has not changed since she was a student. For years, she submitted abstract drawings and paintings to convey her ideas, because, as she would explain with absolute conviction to dubious clients, abstraction was the best way to capture multiple perspectives in two dimensions, and to bring them together in a “distortion field.”

In 1990, Rolf Fehlbaum, the C.E.O. of Vitra, a modernist furniture company, asked Hadid to build a fire station for the volunteer fire department at the company’s production plant in Weil am Rhein. (First, Fehlbaum said, he had asked Hadid to design a chair, but after six months’ work Hadid said that it was impossible. “There are a lot of chairs,” she told him.

Architecture, as Walter Benjamin suggested, is best seen out of one’s peripheral vision.

An Italian TV journalist who had managed to get in asked grandly, “How does it feel to be the first woman to design a public building in the city of the emperors?”

Hadid replied, “I don’t know. I’ve always been a woman. I don’t go around thinking of myself as a woman on a daily basis.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/21/the-abstractionist

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Ghost Parking Lot

https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/4491

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Oliver Messel Set Models

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Basketball, but make it Paris

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Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth, a long, polished, black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into this grassy site contained by the walls of the memorial we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.

The memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition to be understood as we move into and out of it. The passage itself is gradual; the descent to the origin slow, but it is at the origin that the memorial is to be fully understood. At the intersection of these walls, on the right side, is carved the date of the first death. It is followed by the names of those who died in the war, in chronological order. These names continue on this wall appearing to recede into the earth at the wall's end. The names resume on the left wall as the wall emerges from the earth, continuing back to the origin where the date of the last death is carved at the bottom of this wall. Thus the war's beginning and end meet; the war is ‘complete,' coming full- circle, yet broken by the earth that bounds the angle's open side, and continued within the earth itself. As we turn to leave, we see these walls stretching into the distance, directing us to the Washington Monument, to the left, and the Lincoln Memorial, to the right, thus bringing the Vietnam Memorial into an historical context. We the living are brought to a concrete realization of these deaths.

Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss, it is up to each individual to resolve or come to terms with this loss. For death, is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained with this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reflection and private reckoning. The black granite walls, each two hundred feet long, and ten feet below ground at their lowest point (gradually ascending toward ground level) effectively act as a sound barrier, yet are of such a height and length so as not to appear threatening or enclosing. The actual area is wide and shallow, allowing for a sense of privacy, and the sunlight from the memorial's southern exposure along with the grassy park surrounding and within its walls, contribute to the serenity of the area. Thus this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them.

The memorial's origin is located approximately at the center of the site; its legs each extending two hundred feet towards the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The walls, contained on one side by the earth, are ten feet below ground at their point of origin, gradually lessening in height, until they finally recede totally into the earth, at their ends. The walls are to be made of a hard, polished black granite, with the names to be carved in a simple Trajan letter. The memorial's construction involves recontouring the area within the wall's boundaries, so as to provide for an easily accessible descent, but as much of the site as possible should be left untouched. The area should remain as a park, for all to enjoy.

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Jackie’s White House renovation, from https://communedesign.tumblr.com/

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